Öxarárfoss

Where it sits. Öxarárfoss falls over the eastern lip of Almannagjá inside Þingvellir National Park, roughly 800 metres north of the Hakið visitor centre and about 45 kilometres from Reykjavik. The Öxará river gathers on the moors below Ármannsfell, runs south across the lava, and then drops in one clean ledge of around thirteen metres onto a fan of basalt blocks at the foot of the rift wall. Below the falls the river braids across the plain, slides past the dark pool known as Drekkingarhylur, and finally reaches Þingvallavatn. The whole scene sits inside the graben, so the water is falling into a valley that is still slowly sinking between two faults.

Why the river is here at all. Icelandic tradition holds that the Öxará was deliberately rerouted in the early medieval period so that the thousands of people camping at the annual assembly would have fresh water within reach of the booths. The claim appears in old accounts of the Alþingi rather than in any dated document, and no one can now prove it from the ground. What is visible is suggestive: north of the falls the river runs in a channel that cuts across the lava at an angle the terrain does not obviously demand, then turns hard into the gorge. Whether engineered or natural, the result put a waterfall at the doorstep of the assembly, and the river became part of the site's legal geography — the pool downstream was used for executions by drowning between the early seventeenth and mid eighteenth centuries.

The rock. The falls expose a cross-section of the western boundary fault. Layer upon layer of lava, some of it neatly jointed into columns, forms the wall, with rubble and frost-shattered blocks piled at the base. That apron is not decorative: it is what the cliff has shed since the plain began to drop, and it grows a little with each hard freeze-thaw cycle. Flow varies enormously through the year. In late May and early June, meltwater from the moors can triple the volume and the fall spreads across the full width of the ledge. By late August in a dry summer it narrows to a single ribbon and the boulder field dominates. In deep winter the spray builds a ledge of ice, the pool below rims over, and the falls can freeze into a hanging column.

On screen. Öxarárfoss appears on nearly every Game of Thrones itinerary sold in Reykjavik, and the association deserves a precise answer rather than a marketing one. The production's season-four unit did work this stretch of Þingvellir in 2013, using the Almannagjá corridor a few hundred metres downstream as the road to the Bloody Gate and the broken lava nearby for the fight between Brienne of Tarth and the Hound. The waterfall itself is not identifiable in any of those frames. What the visit delivers is the setting rather than the shot: the same forty-metre basalt wall, the same grey scree, the same weather that gave the Vale sequences their bleakness. Travellers who want the exact camera positions should walk the gorge, not queue on the viewing deck.

What you actually see today. A raised timber boardwalk carries the path from the gorge floor to a viewing platform directly opposite the drop, built to stop the trampling that was steadily wrecking the moss and gravel. The deck is narrow, and in the middle of the day it becomes a single-file queue, since tour groups arriving at P1 walk the gorge in one direction and meet groups walking back. From the platform the wall rises around thirty metres above the water, and ravens work the updrafts along it. The falls face roughly east, so morning light hits the water while the wall stays in shadow, and late afternoon flattens the whole scene — photographers generally do better with overcast conditions or the long low light of September evenings.

Getting there and timing. Two approaches work. P1 at Hakið puts the visitor centre, the overview of the rift and the head of the gorge together, then delivers a paved 800-metre walk down to the falls. P2 sits closer to the base and gives the shortest route on foot, roughly ten minutes over gravel and boardwalk. All Þingvellir car parks share one daily fee, paid by number plate. Coaches on the Golden Circle circuit arrive from about ten in the morning until four in the afternoon; before and after that the boardwalk is quiet. In winter the timber ices hard and the descent through Almannagjá is genuinely slick, so traction spikes are the difference between a pleasant fifteen-minute walk and a fall on stone.